Tag Archives: USPS

With tax reform now in the rear view mirror on President Donald Trump’s list of priorities, it is clear now that he has another mishandled federal issue in his sights – the U.S. Postal Service. In a tweet posted just before the New Year, the President asks why the USPS is, “charging Amazon and others so little to deliver packages, making Amazon richer and Post Office dumber and poorer?”

This consternation refers to an analysis conducted by CitiGroup, which found that Amazon deliveries received an astounding average subsidy of $1.46 per package. Multiply this giveaway by hundreds of millions of packages that are captured by the secretive deal (known as a Negotiated Service Agreement) and it appears that USPS’ package losses surely are tremendous.

Even worse, Amazon may also be causing the integrity of USPS to deteriorate. In fact, reports from California, Utah and Georgia indicate that the Postal Service has been falsifying Amazon package deliveries. Continue reading →

On February 2, 2017, Frontiers of Freedom President, George Landrith made the following statement on Postal Reform:

“With a nationwide decline in the service performance standards of the U.S. Postal service, members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have introduced a bill that is ill-equipped to handle the real problem at hand. For two consecutive years USPS has failed to meet delivery goals for nearly every First-Class mail product and yet the bill fails to properly establish greatly needed mail performance requirements. This bill also ignores the rate-setting process with its regulator by calling for a price increase that further jeopardizes the Postal Service’s fundamental charge to provide quality service at reasonable cost. Instead of pulling the Postal Service out of the gutter where it currently lies, this bill regrettably keeps the structural problems that plague the federal agency and limits their ability to put customers first.”

Throughout his career, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders has championed postal reform. He wants to save the United States Postal Service and its hundreds of thousands of public employee union jobs, by broadening the scope of its activities.

It’s an interesting idea, which is probably why the American Postal Workers Union was an early presidential endorser, and a bad one. Allowing the USPS to transact non-bank financial services opens the door to competition in areas private business has shown it can handle quite competently, thank you very much.

It’s inevitable a full range of banking services would eventually follow, free of the encumbrance of the onerous Dodd-Frank requirements and the overly invasive Consumer Financial Protection Board the massive new banking law spawned. The idea is already out there. More than one policy wonk has hit on it as to provide services to what folks have taken to calling the under-banked. Continue reading →

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Frontiers of Freedom, founded in 1995 by U.S. Senator Malcolm Wallop, is an educational foundation whose mission is to promote the principles of individual freedom, peace through strength, limited government, ...